The Decoration of Houses, by Edith Wharton, Part 1
Boring Books for Bedtime Readings to Help You Sleep
Sharon Handy
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 31 January 2022
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sink into tasteful slumber this week with the history of home decor from the Queen of The Gilded Age. Basically, "like Italy and be rich" seems to sum it up.
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Read "The Decoration of Houses" at Project Gutenberg:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime. |
| 0:09.0 | I hope tonight selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep. |
| 0:18.8 | So find a comfortable spot. |
| 0:36.0 | Adjust your volume, take a nice deep breath in, let it out slowly and off we go. |
| 0:45.5 | Several of you have written in to request I read something from one of the great authors of America's Gilded Age. So tonight, let's relax with the decoration of houses by Edith Wharton and Ogden-Coddman Jr. first |
| 0:58.6 | published in 1897 by Charles Scribner's sons, New York. |
| 1:07.0 | Let's begin. |
| 1:10.5 | Introduction Rooms may be decorated. Introduction |
| 1:16.0 | Rooms may be decorated in two ways by a superficial application of ornament |
| 1:20.0 | totally independent of structure or by means of those architectural features which are part of the organism of every house, inside as well as out. In the Middle Ages, when warfare and brigandage shaped the conditions of life and men camped in their castles as much as they did in their tents. |
| 1:47.1 | It was natural that decoration should be portable, and that the naked walls of the medieval chamber should be hung with Aris, while a seal or ceiling of cloth stretched |
| 2:01.3 | across the open timbers of its roof. |
| 2:05.0 | When life became more secure, |
| 2:08.0 | and when the Italian conquests of the Valois |
| 2:11.0 | had acquainted men north of the Alps with the spirit of classic tradition, |
| 2:17.0 | proportion, and the relation of voids to masses gradually came to be regarded as the chief decorative values of the interior. |
| 2:28.9 | Portable hangings were in consequence replaced by architectural ornament. |
| 2:35.3 | In other words, the architecture of the room became its decoration. |
| 2:42.4 | This architectural treatment held its own through every change of taste |
| 2:47.6 | until the second quarter of the present century. But since then, various influences have combined to sever the natural connection |
| 2:58.9 | between the outside of the modern house and its interior. In the average house the architect's task seems |
| 3:08.1 | virtually confined to the elevations and floor plan. The designing of what are today regarded as insignificant details, |
... |
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